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Showering. A spider came dangling down from the ceiling, right in front of my face. A smooth spiderwoman drop, front legs raised in fearless poise. How graceful she was, descending into the steamy waterfall! The subsequent dance. (I imagine myself played by Kim Cattrall.) Me, nude, startled bonkers. She, versatile, evading my careful attempts, trying again with more elaborate gestures, to catch her by her thread. I failed. She lifted herself up and escaped into obscurity (the thatched bamboo ceiling).
The bathroom is where we keep a seminar of spiders. They are good at catching bugs and generating ideas.
Beat on the kul-kul summons people to the pura this morning and gamelan starts for the ceremony. Incense smoking, offerings aloft, village is alert, decisive. Brass shivers and syncopated heartbeat and (bodies marching and) the bell of the Mangku, high and bright. All attention put on the spirit. Barong moves through the streets today, transportation by music, in full regalia. (The battle for balance. Stops traffic, stops everything. Alhamdulillah. And what are you being called to do?)
Beginning again with a tentative rhythm. Afternoon sun, slanted, partial, and hot, with persimmons on the kitchen counter. Irregular spheres, some squat or approaching rounded-square, pale orange or chartreuse waxy skin speckled and clouded with powdery must. I choose three. Stemleaf (calyx) thickly coated, looking ancient. Paring knife separates (as a broken spiral, drops) skin from clean flesh inside, cut open, with octagonally-spoked slivers for (not there) seeds. Firm between teeth, shifts to pulpy softness, floral honey sweet, young and complicated with something nostalgic. A fragrance from childhood candy. Games of pure pleasure being just out of reach.
I found the Margaret spoon when I was packing the wardrobe, I mentioned it to my mother and she was reminiscing about her grandmother (Margaret). How she would play the piano and sing, and her grandfather would sing too, and their “beautiful voices”. She (my mom) remembered that from when she was six years old. (In my imagination, she plays lieder by Franz Schubert, I listen to it now.) Margaret was also an amateur astronomer, which has me thinking about studying constellations. It’s often too cloudy here for stars.
Cloudy again tonight, and raining, and the sky is an inky thickness. They sit around a cross-section of tree, cigarette packs out, kripik passed. Low conversation. Light bullying. A start, a decision, not quite unanimous, to go on the roof. Bare feet up homemade ladders, disembodied voices, and the night tips over that always close-by edge into surreality.
Emptying the wardrobe. // (Finally.) Piece by piece sorting clothes (and other things) into (commandeered from cats) cardboard boxes. Items that disappeared, (underclothes, mostly), constantly needed and vaguely missed, one by one reappear, having been crumpled into rear corners, crevices, hiding between darker and heavier things. One could have sworn one had checked there, again and again. Some coated in dusty grey mold, some apparently eaten by it, elastics and polyester blends stiffened or dissolved or having become oddly, unpleasantly sticky in the dank incubator, black box, organizer’s nemesis, which has in certain ways ruled over us these past years, determining what we were allowed to have, and what not. You see, the tropical climate is unsuited to long-term storage (or possession) of anything at all (subject to disintegration).
(Avoiding questions, whether we could have been happier here, if we had done this all a little bit differently.) (We came to the guesthouse in February 2020. Having no idea what was about to happen, of course we stayed much longer than planned.)
The satisfaction of shining light on the interior of a more-or-less orthogonal container. Hollow. An empty possibility, belonging soon to somebody else. Sketching boundaries between ourselves and whatever will become of that.
Waking up back in the old, time-wise upside-down, and a sense that all observations will be observations of discomfort. In the midst of transition there are moments of feeling somewhat brutally nowhere. Like a baby, on its birthday, new-born, (being sensitive to babies, for they know something true), crying because all is lost. Then, as an adult, healing knowledge with mantra. All is indeed lost. (This is something, but not it.) And there is a home. (And you already know it.) So repeat it until you believe it. (Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.
)…(
Repetition until morning’s end.)
Night in cloud. With sounds of water surrounding, an evolution from gerimis (drizzle) to soft patter to steady downfall, with drips following waterworks around the house, (in which, fish respirate) small splashing pours, shifting flows through ducts, now slowing into more percussive plonks and plinks and poinks, tinkles and trickles, like this jungle is designed by frogs. A nestled-in rainforest of fractal-shaped puddles arrayed through heartleafs and stems reverberating. This is a very rich ambient sound, and I wonder about sleep, or disturbed dreams, lost connectivity, (unexpected, of course), and mental compulsions related to that. How this was probably written late last night relative to when it will be sent. Just so, a blog inelegantly measures motion. As trial and failure at learning nothing. So imagine this, but yesterday, and we found ourselves watching old videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing the Nutcracker. My mother used to speak somewhat breathlessly of him, his body, (in translucent stocking), and its parts, so visibly distinct. Me, then, in tight-pulled bun, (tears), and pale pink tutu. Today, a grainy image of a man leaping (if we could be parts of that, composed) into a momentary stillness.
Sun Salutation. // Grey morning with here and there spots of rain, where shaded distances contour the horizon, making clear certain things that need doing. Hating. (Be not afraid. Let me neutralize this word, my self.) Rough or reflective edges, surfaces, too much or too little sound or light or tactile or calculative
friction.
With neither apology nor anger, (heartless), the actor’s genius of making it her own, (editing), (object murder), as it’s fraught enough to be born, (a dream incarnate), (a serpent without a shell), let me not be such a stranger to my own re-armored skin. (Warm welcome to you, this cancer season. And a reminder that, from every end of creation, all is just beginning.)
Star-crushed velvet of night song. A dog barking, distant concern. Chilly, under blanket, eardrums dilated. Everything slows. And an airplane, holding space open like a dream. (.)
Moving house starts today, according to the island gods. Ceremony this morning, awake before dawn to comb through the details, mentally then materially preparing everything. Not least, (my body), sarung, kebaya, symbolic trimmings. Painted on face, twisted up hair. Becoming a symbol, in person and gesture. Ceding control to complex performances, letting it be whatever it is. Stretching outward the various senses, as one does when (humbly, although today, quite publicly) summoning cosmic significance.
Thoughts fallen into all the wrong places, as if settled into gutters, now stuck there glaring back with soapy sachets of synthetic perfume, no solutions, and a lot of bitter complaints. Taking shelter in small wrongs, lost perspective, petty despair. Needing reasons to laugh, get turned on one’s head, reset. (Monkeys? Maybe. And just literally standing on my head. Being literally upside-down is being upside-down!)
Battlegrounds at borders, clashing signs, // have me wondering this morning, are we artworks or alive? And the conflicts between us, what they say. That living (bodies) fight as bodies, over territory and resource, and cannot overlap. While artworks are hypothesis, from their inception, and somewhat placeless. So artworks violate embodied borders. Like airborne virus, impossible to contain.
Community of action, community of speech. The latter demands unison, sameness, in what is said. While the former works from difference. Different parts do different things, for the sake of accomplishing some one thing, impossible alone. One cooks, one cleans, one repairs the house, one goes to market. One economizes, one prioritizes. Actions for the sake of all, though each might have something (very) different to say.
Is it person? Or is it hypothesis? Here, behind these signs. Hypothesis is lawless. Bodies have no immunity against it. (Contrary to the myth of liberal arts, this was the function of education. Not “freedom”. But immunity, protection, fortification, against this.) That there could have been a body, a citizen, a living human being, subject to certain laws and customs. But poetry renounced that limit. Escaped sidedness. So poets make (if at all) mediocre (at best) neighbors. And,
A life of beauty is (almost always) a life of crime.
Blustery when I enter the bale today, trees tossed and swaying arhythmically down through their trunks. Some sprung tension in the spoken words, plans for travel changing around plans for ceremonies that changed plans for someone’s birthday. (A different present, is all that means.) Plans suspended and cast around like leaves in the fire of mid-day sun. Taking Sweet Orange to the heat island today, for ceiling fans, to make our own air. As we batten down the nearest future, temper possibility with the need to live in it, with shape and stability of steady wood. BUT how it whips through locks of hair, skims past cloth to know by touch the skin, which raises spirit into chills of fresh sensation, altogether un-imagined, is the wind-kissed exhilaration of promised days beyond ground, beyond even gravity, when we (or whatever we have become) will live in aerial dimensions, as shapes unbodied, unbuilt, and fleeing toward an ungovernable unknown.
Less traffic and an overall hush in the neighborhood today. A thick ceiling of clouds holds the light down and keeps sound muffled. Doves curr-curr as always and a rooster crows from far away. Solid clinking together of dishes, loud thwack to ignite the gas stove, scrape of wire across glass opens the coffee jar. Small sandals slapping concrete, fast passage through the back alley, but no voices. Feeling somewhat bruised and reluctant to move. Not wishing to be carried up the mountain.
Given the Anthropocene, a weather report in its accuracy becomes a poem. Instead of saying “It will rain,” or “It will not rain,” the weatherman, (witnessing subject as substance), says, “We will rain,” or, “We will not rain.” And if he speaks winged words, “It is raining in my heart.”
Indeterminate clear, nice day for a Saturday morning, a modest tower, safe, from which to see. Last night. A past-hyped art piece (ha) that turned familiar in disturbing ways. That a certain world, once inhabited without question, was already perverse, designed by greased-up power-clowns, and world-historical problems, if not made clear, at least had some ugly guts spilled out, glorious tacky, and evil, almost innocent with shamelessness. A devil’s garden (Manhattan, Berlin, Jerusalem?). What things were born that still bear fruit, etc.
Weekend questions, am I fruit? As I breakfast (fried plantains with drizzle of palm sugar) leisurely on the bale with Glagahdowo and Pacitan (husband and G. and A.). Nongkrong. Temperature the same as skin. Sweetness on teeth, obscure (to me) vernaculars bouncing out time, bitter coffee biting down. The joy of being included, with eye-contact, in laughter, at a harmless joke, (about the pisang goreng, and who accidentally picked the over-burned piece). How I covet such rudimentary signs of trust. (Re-making a life on their foundation.) While contemplating a different city, and whether it could ever be, that certain things that happened, never happened.
Woken by earthquake. Between clean sheets, a brief interval of (probably insufficient) alertness. Light rattle of windowpane. Being moved. Doesn’t stop so much as fade into a wobbly hallucination. Pathos, a (mercifully) gentle reminder. That ground is also made of shifting-in-relationship pieces.
Now is the time of the lunar month when I start having (noticing) the darker feelings. (Also. Random waking, trouble sleeping, heightened sensitivity to smell.) I never know how much of that (“the darkness”) I want to put into the blog, or how much choice I have in the matter, or even whether this is any different than my normal (purple and pink) word salad. (It’s a blog about my salad days.) And it makes me feel a universal guilt. So I would like to say I’m sorry to everyone (including those not in my life).
(Every poem is an apology, broken in one way or another.)
Last night, beneath a sky full of stars. Crickets and tongaret and frogs of a hundred voices, night bird from the jungle with a wistful lilt. Full chorus. From within, Pacitan and Glagahdowo chat tentatively as they wire a fixture, poke fun at R., the youngest, for an accident with the motorbike. (He’s ok.) How did so much time pass without seeing stars? (One of rainy season’s more subtle effects, no stars for months.) The sound and the visible meet in expansive absorption. One doesn’t want to leave the moment for anything.
(One must, and so, one does.)
This morning. Wake in the different, the old, the becoming emptier place, where our presence thins. Wijaya kusuma, orchids, instruments, gone. Cats observant, unsure of change. To abandon all of these heavy, unfixable things.
But our footsteps are lightness. We orchestrate movement, flowing now as if downhill. We tell Blih that he absolutely must come visit (arguing against his inner voices). And we prepare, part by part, to disappear.
(To the place where one listens to stars.)
Amber citrine on midnight velvet smiling surprised me above the tree line as we left to see what the house (electric installation) looks like by night. Giving shapes and lines an implied trickery or deception, warmly but also cruelly comedic, elegant. The moon with two horns. Reasons to be happy and reasons to be very very sad, these past few days. Rediscovering the deep well dug down through the bedrock of the soul called grief.